An anonymous reader quotes Business Insider: Wrecked Russian fighter jets are being found with rudimentary GPS receivers "taped to the dashboards" in Ukraine because their inbuilt navigation systems are so bad, the UK's defense secretary, Ben Wallace, said.... "[W]hilst Russia has large amounts of artillery and armor that they like parading, they are unable to leverage them for combined arms maneuver and just resort to mass indiscriminate barrages," he added....

Last month, Ukrainian troops paraded what they said was a Russian drone that had been covered in duct tape and fitted with a generic plastic bottle top for a fuel cap. In March, Ukrainian troops found what appeared to be Russian army bandages dating to 1978 discarded on a battlefield. In his Monday speech, Wallace said Russian vehicles "are frequently found with 1980s paper maps of Ukraine in them" and that soldiers were using "pine logs as makeshift protection on logistical trucks" and attaching "overhead 'cope cages' to their tanks."

"After they broke up four decades ago, ABBA famously refused all kinds of money for reunion ABBA-tars and performances," writes Rolling Stone.

"But a few years ago, British entrepreneur Simon Fuller pitched an idea that piqued the Swedish superstars' interest..." "We got sort of turned on by the thought that we could actually be onstage without us being there," ABBA singer-songwriter Benny Andersson says over Zoom.

The band, along with Fuller and their producers Ludvig Andersson (Benny Andersson's son) and Svana Gisla (music-video producer for the likes of Radiohead and Beyoncé), initially explored reproducing themselves by hologram technology, but that didn't pan out. They finally realized a grander dream: ABBA Voyage, the 196-show concert residency at newly built ABBA Arena in London's Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park that begins May 27. Made with help from George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic, digital avatars (also known as ABBA-tars) embody the stars in their Seventies prime, performing a 22-song set alongside a flesh-and-blood backing band assembled by James Righton of the Klaxons and including U.K. singer Little Boots on keys....

The band and the team and ILM realized early on that an existing venue wasn't going to work for the residency. There are 1,000 visual-effects artists on ABBA Voyage, making it the biggest project ILM has done, according to Gisla (and this is the company behind Star Wars, Marvel, and Jurassic Park). The roof of ABBA Arena was reengineered three times to fit the complicated lighting system. Where many concerts might use only one lighting rig, this one uses 20.

There was a lot of work put into making the ABBA-tars — which, the band stresses, are not holograms, but digital versions of the members that look like real, physical performers. Not too long before the pandemic put things to a near-halt, the four members of ABBA met from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day, for four and half weeks straight, performing for 200 cameras and a crew of nearly 40 people while wearing motion-capture suits. They posted up in a sound studio within the Swedish Film Institute, playing all the songs they had carefully curated for their first show in 40 years. "It was really a pleasure for all of us," Andersson says.

Back in London, body doubles emulated the performances, but with a younger energy. "We are sort of merged together with our body doubles. Don't ask me how it works because I can't explain that," Andersson continues. "If you're 75, you don't jump around like you did when you were 34, so this is why this happened."
Producer Ludvig Andersson adds: "We hear often, 'This is the dawn of a new era in live entertainment.' I think that's an incorrect statement. I don't think it is. This is unique."

Calling a man bald can now be classed as sexual harassment, a U.K. employment tribunal judge has ruled. From a report: Three members of the tribunal who decided on the ruling, and alluded to their own experience of hair loss, said that baldness was more prevalent in men than women. Therefore, they argued that the use of the word "bald" as an insult related to a "protected characteristic of sex." The tribunal compared calling a man bald to commenting on the size of woman's breasts, based on a 1995 case. The ruling, published Wednesday, was made on a case where the insult was alleged to have been used against Tony Finn, while he worked as an electrician for the British Bung Manufacturing Company. Finn had worked at the company, which manufactures wooden cask closures for the brewing industry, in Yorkshire in the northeast of England, for nearly 24 years. He was fired last year and the circumstances around his dismissal were also part of the case. Finn claimed that he was called a "bald c---" and was also threatened by his shift supervisor, Jamie King, in a dispute in July 2019.

The world is creeping closer to the warming threshold international agreements are trying to prevent, with nearly a 50-50 chance that Earth will temporarily hit that temperature mark within the next five years, teams of meteorologists across the globe predicted. NPR reports: With human-made climate change continuing, there's a 48% chance that the globe will reach a yearly average of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels of the late 1800s at least once between now and 2026, a bright red signal in climate change negotiations and science, a team of 11 different forecast centers predicted for the World Meteorological Organization late Monday. The odds are inching up along with the thermometer. Last year, the same forecasters put the odds at closer to 40% and a decade ago it was only 10%.

The team, coordinated by the United Kingdom's Meteorological Office, in their five-year general outlook said there is a 93% chance that the world will set a record for hottest year by the end of 2026. They also said there's a 93% chance that the five years from 2022 to 2026 will be the hottest on record. Forecasters also predict the devastating fire-prone megadrought in the U.S. Southwest will keep going. "We're going to see continued warming in line with what is expected with climate change," said UK Met Office senior scientist Leon Hermanson, who coordinated the report.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Sky News: The UK, US and EU have formally accused Russia of being behind a cyber attack targeting a satellite communications network used in Ukraine. Businesses and individuals using routers made by Viasat, an American business that provides broadband-speed satellite internet connections, were knocked offline just before tanks began to roll into the country.

"The cyberattack took place one hour before Russia's unprovoked and unjustified invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, thus facilitating the military aggression," the EU said in its statement. "Although the primary target is believed to have been the Ukrainian military, other customers were affected, including personal and commercial internet users," the Foreign Office added. As a result of the attack 5,800 wind turbines in Germany were knocked offline as they depended upon Viasat routers for remote monitoring and control. The company said in total tens of thousands of its terminals were effectively destroyed and needed to be replaced. UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said: "This is clear and shocking evidence of a deliberate and malicious attack by Russia against Ukraine which had significant consequences on ordinary people and businesses in Ukraine and across Europe. We will continue to call out Russia's malign behavior and unprovoked aggression across land, sea and cyberspace, and ensure it faces severe consequences."

The attack was described as "yet another example of Russia's continued pattern of irresponsible behavior in cyberspace, which also formed an integral part of its illegal and unjustified invasion of Ukraine," in the EU's statement.

"Such behavior is contrary to the expectations set by all UN member states, including the Russian Federation, of responsible state behavior and the intentions of states in cyberspace. Russia must stop this war and bring an end to the senseless human suffering immediately," the EU added.

An anonymous reader writes: Former NASA engineer Mark Rober builds some awesome stuff on his YouTube channel, like devious squirrel mazes, but his most popular video series is the annual glitter bomb, a beautifully over-engineered fake package that douses porch pirates with a shower of glitter and fart spray. In an unexpected twist, last year's glitter bomb video also helped police catch and arrest someone involved in a phone scam scheme, and Rober's spent the subsequent year digging into just how these phone scam operations work. In a new video he shows off the extensive results of that effort, including hiring double agents to infiltrate several phone centers in India and hacking their security camera footage. And of course he got off a stink bomb, too.

For Rober, this crusade started when he teamed up with another YouTuber, Jim Browning, to try to send a glitter bomb to a scammer operation. Browning's whole channel, which has 3.7 million followers, is devoted to identifying the call centers behind tech support scams and refund scams. These scams typically target the elderly and less computer-savvy folks and usually rely on the scammers gaining remote access to your computer and then tricking them into giving up personal information like their bank account login. 'Refund' scams make people believe they've been overcompensated with some bogus refund and trick them into sending cash in the mail to the scammers. The people who receive those cash packages in the United States are essentially underlings in these scam operations, so after getting a glitter bomb in their hands last year, Rober set his sights on the call centers themselves. With Browning's help, they were able to gain access to the CCTV of the infiltrated call centers, while another YouTube pair, Trilogy Media, traveled to Kolkata, India to run operations on the ground. Also worth checking out: Kitboga's YouTube channel.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Scientists are developing magnetically guided microscopic projectiles that can be injected into patients' blood to attack breast, prostate and other tumors. The project -- led by researchers at Sheffield University -- builds on progress in two key medical fields. The first involves viruses that specifically attack tumors. The second focuses on soil bacteria that manufacture magnets which they use to align themselves in the Earth's magnetic field.

The anti-cancer viruses that are being exploited by the Sheffield group -- who have been funded by Cancer Research UK -- are known as oncolytic viruses. They occur naturally but can also be modified to improve their efficacy and to limit the chances of them infecting healthy cells. [...] "The problem is that oncolytic viruses attract the attention of the body's immune defenses and only skin-deep tumors can be tackled this way before the viruses are blocked fairly quickly by our cell defenses," said Dr Faith Howard, another project leader. A solution, the scientists say, is to coat the viruses in magnetic particles. Injected into the blood, these microscopic projectiles could then be directed quickly to a tumor -- by using magnets placed over a patient's body -- before their progress can be blocked by immune defenses.

An oncolytic virus had a diameter of about 180 nanometers while the magnets needed to be about 50 nanometers in size, added Howard. (A nanometre is a billionth of a meter.) "These tiny magnets could be made in the laboratory but we have found bacteria do a better job of manufacturing them than we could," she added. Some species of soil bacteria synthesize iron oxide nanoparticles that are called magnetosomes. These are used as compasses that allow the microbes to navigate in Earth's magnetic field and help them find optimum conditions for their growth and survival. "These microscopic magnets they make are perfectly shaped and ideally suited to the microscopic packages we need to target deep cancers," Howard said.

The new free trade agreement between Australia and the UK includes a site blocking paragraph. The text requires the countries to provide injunctive relief to require ISPs to prevent subscribers from accessing pirate sites. While this doesn't change much for the two countries, rightsholders are already eying similar requirements for trade deals with other nations. TorrentFreak reports: The inclusion of a blocking paragraph in the copyright chapter of the trade deal was high on the agenda of various copyright holder groups. Following a series of hearings and consultations, both countries settled on the following text:

1. Each Party shall provide that its civil judicial authorities have the authority to grant an injunction against an ISP within its territory, ordering the ISP to take action to block access to a specific online location, in cases where:
(a) that online location is located outside the territory of that Party; and
(b) the services of the ISP are used by a third party to infringe copyright or related rights in the territory of that Party.

2. For greater certainty, nothing in this Article precludes a Party from providing that its judicial authorities may grant an injunction to take action to block access to online locations used to infringe intellectual property rights in circumstances other than those specified in paragraph 1.

This hasn't gone unnoticed by the Alliance for Intellectual Property, which represents rightsholder organizations such as the MPA, BPI, and the Premier League. The group repeatedly urged the UK Government to include site-blocking powers in the agreement. In a recent submission to the UK Government, the Alliance once again stresses the importance of site blocking, while also hinting at broadening the current anti-piracy toolbox. "It has become a hugely valuable tool in the armory of rights holders looking to protect their IP. It is vital that the UK Government ensures the preservation of the no-fault injunctive relief regime," the Alliance writes. "We would also encourage the opening of dialogue, wherever possible, to share experience around UK practices and to encourage faster, more efficient website blocking procedures, whether through civil, criminal, administrative or voluntary means."

The site-blocking language is already included in the latest trade deal draft but the Alliance is also looking ahead at future agreements with other countries. In this context, the blocking paragraph will send a clear message. "We would therefore urge the UK Government to include reference to the site blocking legislation in the FTA with Australia as it will send an important message to future countries that we might chose [sic] to negotiate trade agreements with." The Alliance for Intellectual Property doesn't mention any other countries by name. However, it specifically references a report from the U.S. Copyright Office where site blocking was mentioned as a potential future anti-piracy option. In the same report, the Copyright Office also stressed that further research would be required on the effect and impact of a U.S. site-blocking scheme, but the idea wasn't dismissed outright.

Europe's first commercial facility for psychedelic drug trials is to open in London, with the goal of making the UK a global leader in psychedelics research and innovation. From a report: The British startup Clerkenwell Health aims to begin trials in its central London facility in August, initially focusing on the use of psilocybin to help people deal with the anxiety associated with a diagnosis of terminal illness, and to support them through their end-of-life care. The news comes as scientists and policymakers gather in London this Wednesday for the Agenda for Psych Symposium, a daylong programme to discuss the latest research and the future of the psychedelics industry in Europe.

This week the Washington Post described Russia as "struggling under an unprecedented hacking wave" — with one survey finding Russia is now the world's leader for leaked sensitive data (such as passwords and email addresses). "Federation government: your lack of honor and blatant war crimes have earned you a special prize..." read a message left behind on one of the breached networks...

Documents were stolen from Russia's media regulator and 20 years of email from one of Russia's government-owned TV/radio broadcasting companies. Ukraine's government is even suggesting targets through its "IT Army" channel on telegram, and has apparently distributed the names of hundreds of Russia's own FSB security agents. And meanwhile, the Post adds, "Ordinary criminals with no ideological stake in the conflict have also gotten in on the act, taking advantage of preoccupied security teams to grab money as the aura of invincibility falls, researchers said." Soon after the invasion, one of the most ferocious ransomware gangs, Conti, declared that it would rally to protect Russian interests in cyberspace. The pledge backfired in a spectacular fashion, since like many Russian-speaking crime groups it had affiliates in Ukraine. One of them then posted more than 100,000 internal gang chats, and later the source code for its core program, making it easier for security software to detect and block attacks.

Network Battalion 65 [a small hacktivist group formed as the war began looking inevitable] went further. It modified the leaked version of the Conti code to evade the new detections, improved the encryption and then used it to lock up files inside government-connected Russian companies. "We decided it would be best to give Russia a taste of its own medicine. Conti caused (and still causes) a lot of heartache and pain for companies all around the world," the group said. "As soon as Russia ends this stupidity in Ukraine, we will stop our attacks completely."

In the meantime, Network Battalion 65 has asked for ransomware payments even as it has shamed victims on Twitter for having poor security. The group said it hasn't gotten any money yet but would donate anything it collects to Ukraine.
Ars Technica quotes a cybersecurity researcher who now says "there are tens of terabytes of data that's just falling out of the sky."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader SpzToid for sharing the article!

The BBC reports: Large tech companies such as Google and Facebook will have to abide by new competition rules in the UK or risk facing huge fines, the government said. The new Digital Markets Unit (DMU) will be given powers to clamp down on "predatory practices" of some firms.

The regulator will also have the power to fine companies up to 10% of their global turnover if they fail to comply.... The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) said as well as large fines, tech firms could be handed additional penalties of 5% of daily global turnover for each day an offence continues. For companies like Apple that could be tens of billions of US dollars. "Senior managers will face civil penalties if their firms fail to engage properly with requests for information," the government said. However, it is unclear when exactly the changes will come into force, as the government has said the necessary legislation will be introduced "in due course...."

Google's search engine, which is currently the default search engine on Apple products, will also be looked at by the regulator, the government said.

It added it wants news publishers to be paid fairly for their content — and will give the regulator power to resolve conflicts.
The BBC reports the new rules also "aim to give users more control over their data," and that the new regulator "will also make it easier for people to switch between phone operating systems such as Apple iOS or Android and social media accounts, without losing data and messages."

An influential thinktank that has led the backlash against the government's net zero policy has received funding from groups with oil and gas interests, according to tax documents seen by the Guardian and OpenDemocracy. From a report: Though the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) has always said it is independent of the fossil fuel industry, the revelations about its funding will raise questions over its campaigning. The thinktank has always refused to disclose its donors, but tax documents filed with US authorities reveal that one of its donors has $30m of shares in 22 companies working in coal, oil and gas. Over four years the GWPF's US arm, the American Friends of the GWPF, received more than $1m from US donors. The vast majority of this, $864,884, was channelled to the UK group, with some being held back for expenses.

Of the $1.8m the GWPF has received in charitable donations since 2017, about 45% has come from the US. It received $210,525 in 2018 and 2020 from the Sarah Scaife Foundation -- set up by the billionaire libertarian heir to an oil and banking dynasty. The US-based foundation has $30m-worth of shares in 22 energy companies including $9m in Exxon and $5.7m in Chevron, according to its financial filings. Between 2016 and 2020, the American Friends of the GWPF received $620,259 from the Donors Trust, which is funded by the Koch brothers, who inherited their father's oil empire and have spent hundreds of millions of dollars funding the climate denial movement. "It is disturbing that the Global Warming Policy Foundation is acting as a channel through which American ideological groups are trying to interfere in British democracy," said Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the LSE Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.

People who have been hospitalised with Covid may be left with difficulties in thinking comparable in magnitude to ageing 20 years, research suggests. From a report: As the pandemic swept the world it became apparent that coronavirus could not only cause immediate health problems but also leave some people with often debilitating symptoms -- a condition known as long Covid. According to one UK study, about a third of patients who experienced symptoms after being hospitalised felt fully recovered a year later, with little improvement for most patients in areas including physical function and cognitive impairment. Now experts have revealed that some patients were left with, on average, a lingering cognitive decline.

David Menon, a professor at Cambridge University and senior author of the study, said the degree of impairment was linked to the severity of illness. "[Covid] does cause problems with a variety of organs in the body, including the brain and our cognitive function and our psychological health," he said. "If you can have a vaccine, and all your doses, you will have less severe illness. So all of these problems are going to be less." Writing in the eClinicalMedicine journal, Menon and colleagues report how they examined the results of cognitive tests performed by 46 patients, on average six months after they were admitted to Addenbrooke's hospital in Cambridge between March and July 2020. Of this group, 16 received mechanical ventilation.

Staff at a top London law firm have been told they can work from home permanently â" but they will have to take a 20% pay cut. The Guardian reports: Managing partners at Stephenson Harwood are offering lawyers and other staff the option as City firms try to move beyond solely office-based working in a post-pandemic cultural shift to flexible and remote models. Junior lawyers at the company have starting salaries of 90,000 pounds, meaning anyone taking up the officer would lose about 18,000 pounds. Stephenson Harwood, one of the top 50 highest earning legal firms in the UK and with its headquarters in London, employs more than 1,100 people and has offices in Paris, Greece, Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea. A spokesperson for the firm told the Times that the new working policy would apply to staff at its London office and most of the company's international offices. Partners will not be eligible, though. Full equity partners receive an average of 685,000 pounds annually.

The new salary sacrifice for full remote working policy is being introduced after the company's experience of recruiting lawyers during the coronavirus pandemic who were not based in London, where living costs tend to be higher. However, the company said it expected only a few staff to take up the full-time work from home option because "for the vast majority of our people, our hybrid working policy works well." Staff already have the option of working remotely for two days a week. "Like so many firms, we see value in being in the office together regularly, while also being able to offer our people flexibility," the spokesman said.

Information released under data protection laws sheds light on apparent effort to undermine Canadian research group Citizen Lab. From a report: When Downing Street was recently named as the suspected victim of a phone hack by the United Arab Emirates using the Israeli-made spyware, Pegasus, few were surprised at who was behind the discovery. The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto has for years been a thorn in the side of the NSO Group, deciphering the company's sophisticated hacking tools and -- crucially -- identifying victims of the spyware. Ron Deibert, the longtime director of the Canadian research group, is one of the world's leading experts on identifying digital threats against civil society. John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, is among a relatively small group of experts globally who can identify which iPhones and Android devices have been infected with Pegasus, and which government clients are likely to have been responsible.

It is unsurprising, then, that the pair were an intense focus at Novalpina, the London-based private equity group which took over NSO Group in 2019, and quickly sought to stem its reputation for enabling repressive governments to commit widespread human rights abuses. Using UK data protection laws, Deibert and Scott-Railton last year sought the personal data held on them by Novalpina. The results of their so-called subject access requests, recently shared with the Guardian, contain snippets of hundreds of emails and attachments that included their names. The released data, combined with information from other sources, sheds light on an apparent attempt by Novalpina partner Stephen Peel to gather information on and undermine Citizen Lab. In one case, he even reached out to George Soros, whose foundation is an important Citizen Lab donor, and complained about the researchers.

UK households could save an average of $183 per year by switching off so-called vampire devices, British Gas research suggests. From a report: These are electronics that drain power even when they are on standby. The figures are based on research conducted on appliances in 2019 but have been updated by British Gas to reflect recent price increases. The Energy Saving Trust (EST) said consumers need to consider which devices they leave switched on. It estimates households would save around $68.5 per year by switching off all their devices when not in use. The organisation, which promotes sustainability and energy efficiency, did not give exact details of how it came to this figure. "Stats or prices related to individual appliances depend on several factors, including model, functionality and individual usage," it said.

Arm has moved to regain control of its renegade China unit and replace its chief executive Allen Wu, as the UK chip designer seeks to clear its path to a successful public listing. From a report: The UK chip designer will put forward two individuals to act as co-chief executives of its China joint venture and has received official sign-off to submit the paperwork, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter. The proposed candidates to take over as co-CEOs are Dr Liu Renchen, a government adviser and vice-dean of the Research Institute of Tsinghua University in Shenzhen and Vision Fund managing partner Eric Chen, who has been leading SoftBank's negotiations with Chinese officials. Arm has been trying to oust Wu for almost two years, afterâhe disregarded a 7 to 1 board vote for his removal and unilaterally took control of the company. "Discussions have been going on for a while and this is the proposed solution," said one person close to Arm China's board. "But submission is not the problem, getting authorities to sign off on it is," the person said. The person noted that previous deals to resolve the stand-off had fallen through at the last minute and cautioned: "We still have to see if Allen will be able to derail it."

After Dell's new Compression Attached Memory Module (CAMM) leaked out last week, several tech sites led many to believe that the company was taking a path to "lock out users upgrades." However, according to PCWorld citing both the person who designed and patented the CAMM standard, as well as the product manager of the first Dell Precision laptop to feature it, "the intent of the new memory module standard is to head-off looming bandwidth ceilings in the current SO-DIMM designs." They claim that CAMM could increase performance, improve reliability, aid user upgrades, and eventually lower costs too. From the report: Most of the internet hot takes last week, however, reacted to CAMM being proprietary, which is typically viewed as a method to lock people into buying upgrades only from one company. Dell officials, however, insist that's not the case at all. "One of the tenants of the PC industry is standards," said Dell's Tom Schnell, the Senior Distinguished Engineer who designed much of it. "We believe in that; we put standards into our products. We're not keeping it to ourselves, we hope it becomes the next industry standard."

Schnell said that Dell isn't making the modules and has worked with memory companies as well as Intel on this. In the future, a person with a CAMM-equipped laptop will be able to buy RAM from any third party and install it in the laptop. Yes, initially, Dell will likely be the only place to get CAMM upgrades, but that should change as the standard scales up and is adopted by other PC makers. The new memory modules are also built using commodity DRAMs just like conventional SO-DIMMs.

In fact, Dell points out, it's not even "proprietary" on its own laptops. The first Precision workstations that come with CAMM will also eventually be offered with conventional SO-DIMMs using an interposer. Mano Gialusis, product manager for Precision workstations, said the interposer option goes into the same CAMM mount, too. With CAMM now a reality, Dell's next step is to get it in front of JEDEC, the memory standards organization, to make it available to others, he said. Why not create a standard from scratch? Schnell said its far easier to get a standard minted once it's proven to work rather than trying to simply create something anew every time. The report goes on to say that Dell does hold patents on the CAMM design "and there will be royalties," but "no standard can go forward through JEDEC unless the licensing is not anti-competitive, is reasonably priced, and cannot discriminate against a company."

Europe's Digital Markets Act -- near-finalized legislation to tame the internet's gatekeepers -- contains language squarely aimed at ending Apple's iOS browser restrictions. The Register reports: The Register has received a copy of unpublished changes in the proposed act, and among the various adjustments to the draft agreement is the explicit recognition of "web browser engines" as a service that should be protected from anti-competitive gatekeeper-imposed limitations. Apple requires that competing mobile browsers distributed through the iOS App Store use its own WebKit rendering engine, which is the basis of its Safari browser. The result is that Chrome, Edge, and Firefox on iOS are all, more or less, Safari.

That requirement has been a sore spot for years among rivals like Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft. They could not compete on iOS through product differentiation because their mobile browsers had to rely on WebKit rather than their own competing engines. And Apple's browser engine requirement has vexed web developers, who have been limited to using only the web APIs implemented in WebKit for their web apps. Many believe this barrier serves to steer developers toward native iOS app development, which Apple controls.

The extent to which Apple profits from the status quo has prompted regulatory scrutiny in Europe, the UK, the US, and elsewhere. [...] Now those efforts have been translated into the text of the DMA, which, alongside the Digital Services Act (DSA), defines how large technology gatekeepers will be governed in Europe. [...] In short, when the DMA takes effect in 2024, it appears that Apple will be required to allow browser competition on iOS devices. "The potential for a capable web has been all but extinguished on mobile because Apple has successfully prevented it until now," said Alex Russell, partner program manager on Microsoft Edge who worked previously as Google Chrome's first web standards tech lead. "Businesses and services will be able to avoid building 'apps' entirely when enough users have capable browsers."

"There's a long road between here and there," he added. "Apple has spent enormous amounts to lobby on this, and they aren't stupid. Everyone should expect them to continue to play games along the lines of what they tried in Denmark and South Korea."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Scientific experiments on crabs and lobsters could be curbed when the animal sentience bill becomes law, the Guardian has learned. There are few restrictions on how crustaceans and decapods can be treated in scientific studies, in contrast with mice and other mammals, for which there are strict welfare laws. Because scientists do not have to register how many crustaceans and decapods they experiment on, there are no numbers for how many are used. But because they breed quickly and are sensitive to pollutants, they are frequently used in experiments, especially those that look into how different types of pollution affect the body. But this could be about to change, Home Office sources said after crabs and lobsters were recognized as sentient beings which could feel pain.

The new legislation, which is awaiting royal consent after being approved by parliament this month, means ministers must consider the sentience of animals when implementing policy. This could result in restrictions on how crabs and lobsters can be treated when experimented on. They are not included in the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986, unlike mice, octopuses and various other animals. This means that no licenses or training are required before they can be used in procedures that can cause pain, suffering or distress.

Robert Ellwood, professor emeritus at the school of biological science at Queen's University Belfast, authored the research that found crabs and lobsters feel pain. He welcomed the potential legislative development, but said it must be applied to the commercial fishing industry as well as scientists. "This is a step forward and if people are happy to accept that decapods are sentient and experience pain, then they should be given some protection. But I would see this ... as a problem if they still leave millions of animals in commercial practices that are treated the same as before," said Ellwood, who has worked with crustaceans for 30 years. He added: "To ask scientists to go through all sorts of regulations that affect their work but allow these animals to be boiled alive at will would be unfair. "It is asking for more rules, regulations and red tape, it will take longer to conduct an experiment, but that is a good thing, if it is applied across the board."